


Help

by jessiecrimefighter



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Broken Heart, Depression, F/M, Fear, Gen, Hurt, Jemma's POV, Loneliness, Trauma, Trigger warnings:, mostly canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 02:24:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4589460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessiecrimefighter/pseuds/jessiecrimefighter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One-shot set after 2x14.  Jemma's thoughts when she's lying alone in bed at night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Help

When she turned off the lights each night, it was the only time that she felt she wasn't scrabbling wildly on the slippery surface of her life, trying to grasp hold of something that would stop her from falling. Instead, when she lay in bed in the dark, she was deep in the murk of what was real - paralysing terror and utter, utter loneliness. In the stillness and silence of the base after dark, her thoughts spilled out into the room before her, crowding around her and threatening to choke her where she lay. Inky hands of fear pressed on her chest and gripped her by the throat. Struggling for breath, she would turn the lights back on, grab her tablet, and find some work to keep her mind occupied until exhaustion overwhelmed her.

A careful application of make-up, practiced use of curling tongs, and a smile that felt like the most unnatural thing in the world all hid any traces of her sleepless nights and kept her strung together as she fought her way through every day, working assiduously to hold back the tsunami of danger that could rip away everything she loved. Hydra, Ward, whatever had happened to Raina and Trip in those tunnels, whatever was happening to Skye now, Jemma would keep it at bay, no matter what it took. She didn't understand the world anymore. She used to know how everything worked, she used to understand why everything happened as it did. She would figure out any puzzle, solve any mystery, find the solution to every problem, but now...everything she had thought she knew had been pulled out from underneath her and the universe was alien and frightening. The Chitauri virus that had almost ended her life, the fall of the organisation she had dedicated herself to since her teens, Ward's betrayal that had ripped the very fabric of her life apart, destroying the thing she treasured most, and now Raina's transformation, Trip's horrific death, Skye's frightening new powers - it had all left her with the feeling that she only understood one thing anymore - that the world was chaos, and something terrible could happen at any second and destroy one's life completely. Nothing and no-one was safe. Not even the one thing she had thought she would never lose.

He didn't understand why she had left. Perhaps he never would. And so he hated her now. He couldn't even look at her, couldn't be in the same room as her. She had begun to get used to that, telling herself that his desire for independence from her was helping him to heal - but now he thought she was a threat to Skye. He had lied to her, kept the secret from her, falsified results, all to protect Skye. From her. It shattered her heart over and over again, every time that she thought about it. The hurt would come like a wave and knock her over again, smashing her to bits each time. Why couldn't they understand that she was only trying to help? She was trying to help them. She left so he could get better, she was trying to understand Skye's powers, to protect her from them, to protect everyone from them. But Fitz kept accusing her of not accepting that Skye had changed, or that he had changed. How was she supposed to accept any of this? They weren't just _different_ \- Fitz had struggled to talk or to perform simple manual tasks. Skye was causing earthquakes and the effort not to was breaking her inside. These weren't just differences, they were frightening, heartbreaking, bewildering problems that Jemma didn't know how to fix. And they were acting like she was doing something wrong. Maybe she was. She didn't know anymore. She didn't know how to not feel like this. She didn't know what else to do.

She wanted her mum and dad, but they didn’t just seem far away, they seemed like part of another life to her now. The girl they had raised was a different person entirely. She wondered if they would even recognise her anymore. Even if she left Shield, she could never go back to that life now, she could never be their beloved daughter again. Tarnished as it was, Shield felt more like home to her now. And even then, she wasn’t sure that she fitted in here anymore. All those months alone at Hydra missing her friends, all those nights by herself in that apartment wishing she could be sitting drinking beer and watching TV with them and yet now that she was back at the Playground with them all, she'd never felt more alone. Since Trip had died, Bobbi was the only one who was ever kind to her, the only one who ever showed any concern for her, but as much as she liked Bobbi, she found it hard to trust anyone anymore. Bobbi kept trying to get her to talk about Fitz, but she couldn’t bring herself to really open up. She had been hurt too much, and she kept reminding herself that she didn’t really know that much about Bobbi. She wasn’t exactly forthcoming about herself, as interested as she seemed in Jemma’s life. And Jemma saw the way she kept Hunter at a distance, although she clearly loved him. Bobbi had said deception was part of the territory of being a spy, but Jemma thought there was a difference between lying to strangers to get information that could save lives, and lying to the people closest to you or keeping things from them. She felt sometimes like she was better off alone than to put her trust in Bobbi, even if Bobbi had saved her life. Ward had saved her life too once.

She even missed being undercover sometimes - there was a certain comfort in isolation. Other people hurt to be around. Especially him. She wondered if he knew that every angry word was a punch to her gut, or that every time he walked away from her left a wound. She bled every time she heard him laughing with Mack or saw him watching movies on the sofa with Skye. In her loneliest moments she let herself remember the warmth of his arms as he'd gripped her tightly to him while the tunnels collapsed around them in San Juan. It had been the only time he'd held her since the med pod and the comfort and protection of it had been almost as shocking to her rigid muscles and frayed nerves as if he had electrocuted her. She'd forgotten what affection felt like, she’d forgotten what he felt like and how he smelled. It was so overwhelming she had almost wanted to break away. That impulse had warred with the part of her that wanted to stay there forever.

But then she had always been like that with him. Part of her wanted to keep him so close that they could almost fuse together, and another part of her wanted to push him away, to keep him at arm's length. She had never really understood it, not until now. Because she wanted her world to be ordered and logical and explainable and neat, and yet there he was in the centre of it, making everything messy. And she had always tried to contain it before, by picking up after him, choosing his clothes for him, making him his meals, nagging him to wear gloves in the lab. She tried to keep him ordered and neat and controllable. She labelled him her best friend because that was a term that made sense to her, a term that was safe. It never occurred to her before that he was so much more than that. Not until he pushed that button and the med pod blew apart, and her life with it. She had always liked to feel needed by him, because then she wouldn’t have to think about how much she needed him. Not until he couldn’t finish his own sentences or make his hands do what he wanted them to do. He needed her too much then, and she needed him back, so she left. And it worked, because now he didn’t need her at all, now he didn’t even want her around. The only problem was that now she understood how badly she needed him, how the highlight of any day was a moment in his presence when he didn’t turn away from her, but made eye contact with her or even spoke directly to her. Those moments were painfully rare and it was his anger that kept her company most days. Even his anger she would take - much as it hurt, it was better than his indifference.

And in some ways, Fitz’s anger was more comfort than Skye’s distance. Skye was trying to act like everything was the same between them, but Jemma could sense the walls she had put up around herself now. She knew that she had scared Skye, on the night that she had come back from Puerto Rico, after cleaning up the fragments that were all that was left of Trip, followed by the mutilated bodies of the three agents Raina had killed. She was terrified and angry and she wanted to put a stop to it all, to put a stop to Raina, to whatever had happened in that city. She didn’t know at that stage that Skye had changed as well, she didn’t know that Skye was thinking that Jemma would have put a stop to her too, if she knew. Skye actually thought that Jemma would have hurt her. Fitz did too. They were scared of her. They saw her as a threat. The thought haunted her at night, the ache in her chest often exploding in a sob, the sound echoing back in the dark like a mockery of her aloneness. Night after night, the hot tears burned a path down her cheeks, dripping onto her neck and running down the line of her clavicle. How had things come to this, that her two best friends mistrusted and feared her so much? They had kept Skye’s powers a secret from her, because they were afraid of what she might do. It was the first time Fitz had lied to her, the first time he had ever kept a secret from her. He had thrown the fact that she had lied to him about Hydra back in her face, but that was different. She had lied to him for his own good, and it was the hardest thing she had ever done. It broke her heart the day she left him. He had lied to her because he didn’t trust her. He had lied to her because she had hurt him so badly that now that was all he expected her to do. To hurt people.

He didn’t understand anything she’d done since the med pod. He felt rejected by her, and now he thought she was rejecting Skye. He didn’t understand that everything she had done was to help him, to help Skye, to help everyone. She was trying to keep them all safe. She was trying to make sure that nothing bad would ever happen again. She was trying to fix everything, to get everything back to the way it was. She wasn’t rejecting them, she loved them, she just wanted them to be safe and happy. And they weren’t safe and happy right now. Nothing was safe and happy. She heard Fitz’s voice echoing in her head. _“You didn’t used to be this scared.”_ He said she was scared of the way he and Skye had changed, but he thought that the scariest change was her. He hated her for being scared; if he only saw how terrified she really was, he’d be horrified. If only he saw the dreams she had, in the early hours of the morning when exhaustion finally took over, and she would collapse into sleep. Usually they were back in the med pod, only this time when the door blew, Fitz exploded into fragments, just like Trip. Or sometimes everything would happen as it did in the pod, until she’d swim out with him in tow only to find herself in that tunnel under San Juan. There was always somebody in the tunnel. Sometimes Raina - covered in spikes - would lunge at Fitz and rip his throat out the way she did those agents. Sometimes it would be Skye they’d meet, but then she’d turn into Raina and attack Fitz. Or else Skye would lose control, make the ground shake, and the tunnel would start collapsing around them again. Fitz would get buried under the rubble, and Jemma would try to dig him out, but she couldn’t save him. She would scrabble at the rocks until her hands bled, but she couldn’t reach him. Sometimes the rocks all looked like Trip’s face, sometimes they looked like Fitz’s. She would scream at Skye to stop collapsing the tunnel, but when she turned around, Skye was gone. And in every single dream, no matter where she was, there would be a window. In the med pod, in the tunnel, at some point, she’d look up and see the window. And his face on the other side. Ward’s face. Watching impassively as Jemma lost Fitz over and over and over again, every single night.

She would wake up sweating, her heart drumming against her chest, her body trembling, and the hatred burning in her gut for the man who had taken everything from her. She hated him with the same intensity with which she loved Fitz. That felt wrong to her. It sickened her that the two things were so interconnected in her mind, that she couldn’t think of one without thinking of the other. She hated that her love for Fitz was so tainted by her hatred of Ward. She wanted to erase Ward from existence so that her thoughts of Fitz could be free of him. She wanted him dead so that he could never hurt Fitz or Skye, or anyone else again. She thought about how she used to sit at 4.30 every morning while Ward was in the basement, watching him do his exercises on the security monitor, thinking about how easy it would be to turn off his oxygen, or release a toxic gas into his cell, to take his breath the way he’d taken Fitz’s. If only she had done it while she had the chance. He wouldn’t have escaped, and he would never have taken Skye to her father and to Whitehall, and maybe she wouldn’t have ended up in that temple with Raina. And maybe Trip wouldn’t have either, and he’d still be alive. This was on her. This was her fault. She should have taken action, she could have prevented all this. If she hadn’t been so scared. If she wasn’t always so damn scared. If she saw him again, she wouldn’t be so hesitant. She knew what she needed to do the next time.

Maybe this is what Fitz meant when he said the scariest change was her. The old Jemma Simmons never thought about killing anyone. The idea would have been so far beyond her as to seem ridiculous. But the old Jemma Simmons didn’t know what she knew. That life will cause you unutterable pain unless you are willing to do what it takes to keep those around you safe. Fitz was good and kind and trusting, and Fitz was accepting of people, but Fitz had gotten hurt and he would get hurt again if Jemma didn’t protect him. Skye was brave and strong, but Skye didn’t understand her own powers, and Jemma didn’t even understand them, and how did they know if Skye wouldn’t lose all control, or if these powers got worse, and hurt Skye or changed her into something else the way they did Raina? Jemma needed to protect Skye, to figure out these powers and how to stop them. This is what Fitz didn’t understand. All Jemma was trying to do was to keep them all safe. Maybe one day he’d understand. Maybe one day he and Skye would forgive her. She had already lost them both but she had to find a way to live with that. They would never lose her, she would never stop trying to find a way to help them. And someday they’d see that. That all she wanted to do was help. She was only trying to help.


End file.
